Odessa to the Future

We Invented Social Technologies, Now Let’s Invent Social Organizations

Marina-Gorbis — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:29:25 +0000

I worry about the future of Chatroulette. This widely successful site where random strangers from around the world can chat with each other using their webcams was built by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old Russian hacker. And what a compelling story it has been: a teenager bored with school and clearly captivated by the promise of technology, builds a site in his bedroom. A few months later the site gets more than a million hits a day. Ternovskiy has no idea what Chatroulette could be or what the “business model” behind it is. He boasts to a New York Times reporter that advertising on Chatroulette is kept to a minimum, because ads “distract you from what you want to do on the site.” Ternovskiy cares to get just enough money to keep the site going. Fast forward to today: Ternovskiy is ensconced in Silicon Valley, where eager venture capitalists and seasoned entrepreneurs are advising him on “the business model.” I expect the next incarnation of Chatroulette will be as a channel for social marketing. I can just imagine clicking the “next” button and seeing a ruggedly handsome 20-something proclaiming the wonders of Absolut Vodka or modeling designer jeans.

After all such has been the path of many geeks who started out with the promise of creating communities and connecting people for noble purposes but quickly turned communities they enabled into markets for selling products, services, and data. This is the path of PatientsLikeMe–a site inspired by one the founder’s brothers who developed Lou Gehrig’s disease. The goal was to build a community for people with similar conditions to share treatment information and get knowledge and support from peers. The platform has been extremely successful, with close to 70,000 members to date sharing information on many conditions and treatment regiments. But as the community grew and the scale of operations increased, the opportunity and the promise of turning the community into a business, i.e. to monetize the community, became increasingly apparent. Today, the site sells health data, gathered from member profiles, to drug makers and others for scientific and marketing research. While such data may be beneficial to both patients and pharmaceutical companies trying to develop more effective treatments, the data is also being used to create more effective drug marketing campaigns, something that may actually be harmful to community members.

Patientslikeme, Facebook, Twitter, and, I expect, shortly, Chatroulette exemplify a growing clash between the promise of commons-based platforms and the relentless drive to convert them into profit-driven businesses. The clash is likely to grow simply because the number of such endeavors is growing exponentially. What this clash brings into focus is that while we have invented a generation of transformative technologies, we remain stuck in economic and organizational models of the past.

Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social. They take advantage of intrinsic human motivations to contribute in order to be noticed, to share opinions, to be a part of something greater than ourselves. Otherwise how would one explain remarkable success of Wikipedia and many other crowdsourced sites that rely on contributions of volunteers? Our business models, by contrast, are based primarily on monetary rewards. They are mostly hierarchical and non-participatory decisionmaking processes (Facebook’s unilaterial decisions regarding changes in privacy terms for members is but one example). And they operate without the kind of transparency of information when applied to their own operations that is at the core of communities they enable.

If we are to truly fulfill the promise of technology tools we have created, we urgently need to design new governance models and new ways of creating value. In the least, organizations whose value derives from communities they create should incorporate the governance principles of successful commons organizations and use the same technology platforms that are at the core of their operations for governance purposes. Here are some principles I believe they need to put into practice:

1. Clearly articulate the promise of the platform to the participants, with all the ensuing rights and responsibilities for members
2. Create or elect a community governance board (without direct financial incentives to the project) to guide and review major policy and strategy decisions.
3. Crowdsource major decisions guiding development and evolution of such platforms.
4. Ensure radical transparency around key decisions and financial metrics
5. Create reward structures for management and employees more akin to those of non-profits or coops rather than for-profit entities.

As community members, we, on the other hand, may need to stop thinking of such platforms as completely free and start supporting them financially in the same way we support Public Broadcasting Corporation or other non-profits whose services we use or whose missions we endorse.

We already have several organizations that operate on such principles. Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Sunlight Foundation. Several others use alternative financing mechanisms that are in line with their public and commons-like structure. BoingBoing.net accepts advertising only from organizations whose activities are not in direct violation of core beliefs and messages of its founders, either individually or collectively. Curetogether, another crowdsourced health and treatment platform, does not sell its members’ data; to keep the site going, it helps pharma companies recruit subjects for clinical trials–companies can send their inclusion criteria for trials they need filled or surveys about adverse side effects, which Curetogether can then distribute to members who opt in.

No one would suggest that founders and staff working at organizations such as Twitter, Facebook, Curetogether, or many others like them should be doing it for free or should live in poverty. However, because of the unique promise of these organizations and the fact that without all of our contributions they simply would not exist, traditional profit-based business models just don’t fit them.

It is not that radical of an idea to suggest that our organizational models need to change in line with the evolution of our tools. Let’s not forget that organizations we inherit are not pre-ordained or immutable—they grow out of prevailing cultural norms, economic conditions, and technology infrastructure. Marshall McLuhan famously said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” We invented a new generation of technologies. Now we need to allow those technologies reinvent us and our organizations.

Crowdsourcing Abundance or “Screw’ em, Let’s Do This Ourselves”

Marina-Gorbis — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:14:46 +0000

Thank you, Nicolas Kristof, for reminding us that many Americans have too much and many of us can live quite well and, in fact, be a lot happier if we gave up some of our material wealth (What Can You Live Without? The New York Times, Sunday, January 24, 2010) That’s exactly what the Salwen family Kristof writes about, did—they sold their house, gave half of the proceeds to the Hunger Project, an international development organization, and moved themselves into a much smaller home which surprisingly turned out to be “more family friendly” than their previous one. There was much less space to retreat to, so family members spent more time around each other. “We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen says. Part of this togetherness involved engagement with the work of the Hunger Project in Ghana.

Not everyone has a large house to trade or a large sum of money to donate but look around you—we have excess of stuff, talent, ideas, information—in our homes , in our communities, and in our organizations. We are over-producing and under-utilizing resources all over the place. Witness the recent example of clothing retailers like H&M deliberately mutilating and tossing unsold clothes in the trash. Many experts in retail concede that the practice is not uncommon—for some unfathomable “economic” reason it makes more sense to destroy clothes than to release them into a local community. The situation is even worse when it comes to food. We over-produce and waste a lot of it. According to the USDA, just over a quarter of America’s food — about 25.9 million tons — gets thrown into the garbage can every year. University of Arizona estimates that the number is closer to 50 percent. The country’s supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores alone throw out 27 million tons between them every year (representing $30 billion of wasted food). This is why the U.N. World Food Program says the total food surplus of the U.S. alone could satisfy “every empty stomach” in Africa. How about empty stomachs in our own communities?

The list goes on an on. We have surplus of space—many commercial buildings, schools, corporate and government spaces are underutilized, while many small organizations and individuals are struggling to find spaces for their work. We also have excess of talent—musicians, artists, designers, educated unemployed people, young and old—needing audiences, venues to work in, or contribute ideas to. Many unemployed or underemployed people have excess of time, excess of knowledge, excess of skills. We have excess of empty seats in our cars and not enough public transport to help people get around. I bet we even have medical doctors who are willing to treat people in need for free. This is what many doctors are doing in Haiti right now; this is what many of them do informally among their family and friends.

Just like the global level hunger is largely a problem of distribution rather than production (we currently have enough food available to feed the world’s population), the problem of economic and psychological malaise many of our communities are experiencing may be a problem of distribution rather than supply. If we pulled together available resources at the local level, particularly leveraging surplus currently available within our organizations, we could do a lot to improve our local economies. We can also improve psychological well being in our communities by turning up levels of giving and by increasing connectedness within our communities. And this, according to Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis”, is one of the main contributors to happiness. Haidt points out that, “We are, like bees: our lives only make full sense as members of a larger hive, or as cells in a larger body. Yet in our modern way of living we’ve busted out of the hive and flown out on our own, each one of us free to live as we please. Most of us need to be part of a hive in some way, ideally a hive that has a clearly noble purpose.”

We do come together as caring communities during crises. We are proudly watching outpourings of aid and volunteerism in Haiti. But do we have to only do so when disasters strike? How about using platforms such as wehaveweneed.org, created to help pull together resources for Haiti, for our own communities. Can we create a platform similar to craigslist that allows local exchanges and pulling together resources of all kinds similar to what we are doing in Haiti and other crises areas?

This does not mean abrogating responsibility for changing policies or letting governments off the hook. But with gridlock in Washington and crisis in California and many other states, I am with Doug Rushkoff who exclaims in frustration in a recent blog post “Screw’em. Let’s do This Ourselves.” I believe the future belongs to SEHI’s—Super Empowered Hopeful Individuals—people with an urgent sense of optimism, amplified by the power of our collective intelligence using lightweight social connectivity platforms to get us out of the mess we are in. Let’s do it!

Think The Unthinkable

Marina-Gorbis — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:32:49 +0000

Can you envision a society without money? Can you conceive of a functioning economic system without corporations or in which corporations as we have come to know them play a much-diminished role? Can you imagine a truly participatory governance system beyond Congress, Parliament, or Duma? The mere prospects seem jarring, if not subversive. And yet, I would argue, if you are not thinking these thoughts, you are not paying attention. Because looking across the landscape of deep global recession, environmental crisis, and ongoing technological transformation, it is clear that we are at the beginning of a large-scale organizational transformation that will impact everything we do—from how we organize production to how we grow our food to how we govern ourselves.

It is hard to imagine this today, but people have been conducting economic activities for millennia outside of formal organizational frameworks. In such “traditional” or “peasant economies,” humans were engaged in production of a variety of goods and services in which they sold or traded with others in their geographic proximity. You knew who was a good baker, a good shoemaker, who repaid debts on time, and who was a cheat. However, such transactions were limited in scale. The genius of the types of organizations we’ve perfected in the 20th century is that they allowed us to massively increase the range and scale of these interactions by aggregating resources among strangers and by becoming institutional proxies for the kind of trust we previously reserved for our neighbors and family. We needed large hierarchical organizations in order to find, aggregate, and allocate resources efficiently at massive scales.

What happens, however, if we can increasingly find, aggregate, and allocate resources without the organizational infrastructure we’ve created? What if we do not need organizational proxies, or at least, the kind of proxies we’ve come to rely on, for most things we do? In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky, professor of new media at NYU, writes, “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.” Today, we are indeed changing the communications infrastructure and are just beginning to feel the reverberations of this transformation in our economic life. Publisher Tim O’Reilly calls the infrastructure we are building the “architecture of participation,” and its existence will lead us to re-invent ourselves as a society and as individuals.

After all, organizations we have built are not pre-ordained, inevitable, or immutable creations—they are products of particular times, outgrowths of existing technological, social, and demographic forces. Or as Doug Ruskoff, writer and media expert, puts it, “Economics is not a natural science.”

The new architecture of participation will cause us to reweave the social fabric that links the individual to others and to the larger whole in entirely new ways. It will enable people to find each other, to connect and trade with each other in efficient and productive new ways that are outside of established organizational structures.

So pay attention to new organizational forms that are beginning to dot our landscape. From Kickstarter and LendingClub (new platforms for giving, raising capital, and lending); to Patientslikeme and Curetogether (grassroots platforms for sharing detailed health and treatment data); to numerous mission-oriented project organization platforms like Groundcrew; these are all harbingers of things to come. What is important to study is not whether these particular organizations will survive but the larger shifts they represent. Their design usually does not emerge as a whole from the outset. Rather, we see new structures emerge little by little from the contribution of many. In this, they resemble biological structures in which complexity emerges without a grand central design.

The emergence of new organizational forms coincides with discoveries in neuroscience, biology, quantum physics, and increased ability to model and understand interactions in complex systems. This latest scientific knowledge will usher in new frameworks for how to organize people to get things done.

Scientific management of the 20th century was a brainchild of Frederick Taylor, mechanical engineer and efficiency expert. New gurus of organizational management and design may well be people like Frans De Waal, a primatologist studying empathy and cooperative behavior in groups.

Bureau of Bureaucracy

Marina-Gorbis — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:46:37 +0000

In a fitting ending to my week in Washington DC, with a few hours left to spare, a colleague and I wondered into the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. The museum is celebrating 75th anniversary of the Public Works of Arts Project, an amazing undertaking initiated by Roosevelt in the depth of Great Depression in 1934. It became the first federal project to support the arts nationally. Many of the paintings have a decidedly social realism look and feel. Made me wonder if people in those days organized town hall meetings and protests against the “socialist” President. I can only hope that something as beautiful and lasting will come out of this Depression (or are we still calling it a recession?).

The piece that stood out was an elaborately carved Bureau of Bureaucracy by the artist Kim Schmahmann. As Schmahmann explains in the accompanying video, the cabinet on the outside looks quite functional and resembles a regular Cabinet of Curiosities, common in many European homes. But the exterior is deceptive. Under the veneer of “solidity, legitimacy, authority, purpose, cohesion, and permanence” are hidden crazy dysfunctional drawers, contradictory compartments, twisted game boards, and a collection of documents representing artist’s interactions with bureaucracy—from his birth certificate to a yet to be filled death certificate.

The bureau is whimsical and witty but the most amusing thing was something I am not sure the museum intended. You couldn’t come close to the cabinet to figure out any of its intended meaning, as it was roped off and had sensors on the periphery that were not very well marked. So every minute the alarm went off when someone unintentionally got too close and a guard magically appeared to warn you not to come too close. What was on the inside and the meaning of the cabinet could only be understood if one watched an accompanying video in the next room. Satire of bureaucracy ensconced in its own bureaucratic setting.

I guess there is no escape!

“Teaching With Your Mouth Shut”

Marina-Gorbis — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:04:04 +0000

This is the title of a book written by Donald Finkel, a former professor at the Evergreen State College. Unfortunately Dr. Finkel passed away in 1999 but his daughter Zoe loaned me this book after reading a draft of my essay about Peninsula school. The book sat on my desk for a while until I happened to take it to a bluegrass festival one weekend. Finding myself digitally deprived and with lots of unstructured time on my hands, I started reading the book. It took only a few pages before I was taken in by both, the book and the author. I wish I could’ve met professor Finkel, I wish I were a student in one of his seminars, and I wish every teacher would read this book.

Finkel’s exhorts readers to abandon the prevalent model of teaching as TELLING, He writes:
“Our natural, unexamined model for teaching is Telling…The fundamental act of teaching is to carefully and clearly tell students something they did not previously know. Knowledge is transmitted, we imagine through the act of telling.” What we think of as good teachers just do this in a more captivating way than the not so good ones.

This is the model we need to let go of because, as Finkel points out, numerous studies show that lectures as an instructional method do not deliver results when variables studied include retention of information after a course is over, transfer of knowledge to novel situations, development of skill in thinking or problem solving, or achievement of affective outcomes, such as motivation for additional learning or change in attitudes.

Instead of teaching by telling, Finkel argues that the most important role for a good teacher is to create conditions that inspire students to learn. He suggests that, “a teacher’s job is to shape the environment in a manner conducive to learning,” i.e. to create surrounding social and physical conditions that facilitate learning. Finkel approaches learning as a designer and carefully walks the reader through a series of thoughtful and practical classroom designs that facilitate learning, from writing workshops to open-ended seminars and co-teaching colloquia. He even incorporates lectures into some of his designs but these are surrounded by other types of interactions and are carefully inserted to achieve desired outcomes. Every learning design aims to create an intellectual community that propels participants to want to “figure things out” for themselves rather than for a grade. Finkel is a master of understanding social or community aspects of learning. He draws inspiration from John Dewey and Rousseau but makes theoretical discourse practical and accessible.

What I found particularly appealing about his writing is the respect and care with which Finkel writes about students. It is clear that he was deeply passionate about teaching and students, This is evident from reading some of the personal letters he and his students exchanged as a part of the learning process. Finkel always emphasizes that teaching is a learning experience for him—whether this involves participating in a seminar or a workshop along with students, sometimes without saying anything–reading students’ writings or writing to them. He does not hide the fact that there are the inherent hierarchies in the classroom setting or tricks students into engaging with the subject. He is transparent about what he is doing, arguing that what happens in the classroom is a learning experience in its own right, as important as the subject matter being discussed.

His approach epitomizes the dictum proposed by Rousseau in 1762: “the only instrument of education that can succeed is well-regulated freedom. “ I hope many more educators and policymakers read this remarkable book.

Choice is a Motivator for Reading

Marina-Gorbis — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:39:51 +0000

I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry while reading today’s NYT article about how many teachers/schools are experimenting with giving students choice in what books they read rather than assigning required reading to the whole class. Turns out giving kids choice motivates them to read more. My only response was a proverbial “Dah?!” How long did it take experts to come up with this discovery? Has anyone bothered to just talk to any high school student? Last summer we held a roundtable at IFTF with about 15 high school seniors most of whom talked about loving to read when they were younger but hating “doing” reading in high school both because it was “assigned” and simply because they did not have time to read for pleasure. Is there anything we like to do when forced? Why should reading be any different? The sad part was to read about teachers having to make choices in whether to teach to the test or in in a way that develops the love of reading in students. Here is a reaction of one teacher who was observing a reading workshop where kids were given reading choices:

At the end of the first day the teachers discussed the demands of standardized testing and how some had faced resistance from administrators. Ms. McNeill said her students had so little freedom that they even had to be escorted to the bathrooms.

Suddenly she was overcome with emotion as she contrasted that environment with the student-led atmosphere in Ms. Atwell’s class. “It makes me sad that my students can’t have this every day,” she said, wiping away tears. “These children are so fortunate.”

Confessions of a Recovered “Academic” Parent

Marina-Gorbis — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:29:58 +0000

Thinking again about unintended consequences and how oftentimes what you think is bad for you turns out to be good, this time in connection with education, specifically how what today is construed as “rigorous academic education” filled with AP classes, competitive tests, and loads of homework results in kids turned off from learning. This again based on personal experience.

For 10 years, starting in 1995, my family was engaged in an educational experiment. The experiment involved our son, Greg, who was enrolled at Peninsula school, an 85-year old progressive school in the San Francisco Bay Area. For about half of that time, mostly starting with 4th grade, my husband and I were nagged by doubt: yes, Peninsula is a great environment for kids; yes, Greg is turning out to be a creative, caring, thoughtful human being; but is he getting enough academics? Is he getting enough of the basics in math, writing, and sciences? Several times we seriously thought about taking him out of Peninsula and enrolling him in another “more academic” school. Usually this happened after a conversation with a parent whose child was doing algebra in 3d grade or writing 10 page essays in 5th. The only thing that stopped us from leaving Peninsula was the fact that Greg truly loved it—its teachers, its choices, its grounds, its smells, its music room (more about that later)—and that at some subconscious level we felt that for him, and for us, being at Peninsula was the right thing. We just didn’t know why—it went against all the prevailing wisdom of more accountability, more standards, more rigor, more home work, more time management for kids—all the prescriptions for improving our education system and preparing our kids for a world in which they will be competing for jobs with highly educated kids from China, India, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, noone at Peninsula was good at articulating for a couple of overeducated, analytically minded adults schooled in the “old” system why this was the best kind of education. We constantly saw examples of Peninsula’s success—poised, articulate, and reflective graduates who went on to high schools and did remarkably well. Every time, however, the nagging doubt was still there—yes, it worked for them, that doesn’t mean it will work for Greg. He still can’t do math very well.

The experiment ended with Greg entering a highly regarded college prep high school (Peninsula ends after 8th grade). All three of us held our breaths. Will he be able to function in an intense academic environment? Will he be able to adjust? Will he know how to take tests? Will he feel hopelessly behind his peers in math and sciences? When we came up for air after the first few months of adjusting to a new routine, new commute, new relationships, and everything else that goes along with the transition to high school, we realized that the magic of Peninsula school has worked for Greg. Like all those other Peninsula kids I was hearing from at yearly Graduate Forums, Greg was doing just fine compared to kids from “academically challenging” schools. To our great surprise, a kid who never took Spanish, was able to keep up with classmates who had several years of Spanish instruction. It made us wonder what were these kids really doing during all those Spanish classes in middle school? The greatest adjustment was to have grades at all. At Peninsula kids were not graded; instead parents were invited to meet with the teacher twice a year, mainly to talk about the child—how he was doing socially, emotionally, physically, what he liked/disliked. Each teacher had deep insight into the child, a deep connection with everyone and everything that goes on in the classroom. Academics was a minor part of such conversations, the assessment was about the child as a person.

The biggest surprise started to set in somewhere after the first year of high school and became apparent at the end of Greg’s high school career when we all realized that during the four years of being in a highly academic environment, instead of becoming inspired to learn, Greg, year by year had become increasingly turned off from learning, more and more cynical about teachers, administration, the whole system we call education. From learning being a joy, it became a chore, something you do because someone else is forcing you to do it, something you will be judged on and for which you will be rewarded or punished. To him education became a series of hoops you jump through—do this and you will get that. In other words, he adjusted well–this is exactly how most of his friends felt about school, in fact, they couldn’t fathom that there could possibly be another system, a different way of learning. Every semester I saw Greg get excited about the courses and ideas, and gradually lose interest in both under the pressure of simply having to do too much and under intense pressure.

So, after three years in a highly academically driven school, I found myself turning from a parent concerned with whether her child was getting enough academics, to a parent trying to buck the “academic” system that treats teenagers both as numbers (straight A student or 800 SAT score) and as products that need to be shaped, packaged, marketed, and ultimately sold to colleges. I have come to think of this as my recovery from being a concerned “academic” parent.

My recovery involved deep reflections on our Peninsula experience and why it is that a school whose approach to education flies in the face of today’s wisdom of loading kids with more academics at an earlier and earlier age and having their progress continuously measured to achieve “quantifiable” results, can produce remarkably successful kids open to learning. While it is impossible to sum up all the facets of Peninsula, here are a few things I realized were so important to creating a learning environment at Peninsula and ones sorely missing in traditional academic schools:

Learning is social—too many schools ignore or forget this. Peninsula’s success rests on one of the most intangible of things—relationships. When you visit the school, you find small mixed groups of teachers, students, and staff in the library, in the music room, in the gazebo eating lunch, in the classroom, or out on the Big Field playing games. Teachers and staff at the school are not some separate group that is there to “pour knowledge” into you, to assess, grade, or judge you. They are your friends, mentors, role models, co-discoverers, i.e. “teachers” in the best Socratic sense of the word. Everything at the school is highly personalized and relationship-based. The intense relationship focus is evident in names of classes—there are no 1st, 2nd, 3d grades; instead, there is Josie’s, Gail’s, Garv’s, Lynne’s. Each class has a strong imprint of the teacher who leads it. I always found it curious that people confuse the moniker of Mr. and Mrs. with a sign of respect. To me it is a sign of distance and hierarchy. At Peninsula, relationships—between teachers and students, between teachers who work closely and collaboratively, between parents, teachers, and staff– are at the core of everything. One consistent theme you hear from graduates is that the thing they value and miss most about Peninsula is relationships.

It is relationships that drive kids to learn. Because learning is about participating in a conversation, and kids want to participate in conversations with those who matter to them. If the conversation in their circle is about math or Chaucer, they want to know enough so that they can participate. It is amazing to what lengths kids will go to acquire knowledge so that they can shine in their social circle or in front of people who matter to them. In too many classroom settings, the focus on academics misses this social aspect of learning, in fact, most of the time it is seen as a distraction or an impediment. Instead of thinking so much about curriculum or in addition to that, many more schools should be asking the question “How do we create a social setting in the school to encourage the right conversations?” This involves thinking much beyond what material needs to be covered; it requires teachers to get into social dynamics of groups, individuals, and relationships.

Respect for kids creates respectful and empathetic kids. At Peninsula kids learn to respect adults as equals, not someone they have to obey because of their status in the classroom. Decisions large and small—where to go on a camping trip, how to raise money for a project, how to divide “workjobs” (various cleaning chores around the school), what play to put on, who gets to play what part, what music to perform—are all made by the kids with the teacher serving as a facilitator rather than the decisionmaker. I personally learned so much watching Peninsula teachers negotiate difficult social terrains with kids, I believe I became a better parent myself. In 7th grade, Greg’s class decided to stage “Phantom of the Opera.” Both he and his friend Sam wanted to play the Phantom. The teacher discussed various other options with them which neither one was eager to accept. It finally came down to drawing a straw and Greg won the part. Sam was visibly upset although he tried not to show it. That day in the evening without any prompting, Greg called Sam to offer him the part. “You really wanted it more than I did, so you should get it,” he said. “No,” was Sam’s reply, “you won it fair and square. I will be doing the scenery.” Greg hung up and said to me “We will make sure that next year Sam gets the part he wants. I will just have a smaller role.” Kids made the decision totally on their own, the teacher was there to suggest options but not to take the decisionmaking power away from the kids. How different would the situation have been if the teacher just assigned roles or made the final decision for the kids.

A consistent story you hear from Peninsula graduates is how surprised and shocked they are by the disrespect with which some of their new peers treat teachers in high school. Being disruptive in the classroom? Ridiculing the teacher or sneaking behind the teacher’s back, not to mention cheating, is something completely alien to most Peninsula alums. In my 10 years at Peninsula, I never heard the word discipline mentioned once. Not that individual kids didn’t have problems. These were not viewed, however, as “discipline problems.” Teachers spent enormous amounts of time helping kids “work things out” for themselves and with other kids. I saw remarkable individual transformations take place—a kid who was ostracized by his peers because of annoying behavior, become the most popular kid in class the next year; groups of kids reflecting on their behavior and apologizing to a friend or someone they hurt; a lonely kid getting involved in a music band and becoming a part of a group. This didn’t happen because kids were required to say the obligatory words “I am sorry” or assigned to a group but because they were given time and space to reflect, to figure things out, to work it out for themselves, often aided by adults carefully but unobtrusively guiding them in the process. This is from one of Greg’s essays: “School is not just about academic learning, it’s about learning about yourself as well. And at Peninsula I learned who I am.”

Passion is equally or more important than expertise. I’ve come to the conclusion that content, i.e. what is being taught may not be as important as igniting the passion for learning. And teachers are the ones who have the power to ignite that passion, to see that spark of curiosity in the child, feed it, tend it, and enable the child to create something out of it. More importantly, the teacher who ignites the spark doesn’t necessarily have to be the most knowledgeable about the subject, she is not necessarily the one who has all the answers. She is the one who is excited about it and in turn can pass that excitement to the child. Kids are natural scientists, natural discoverers, all they need is to have someone help them discover and co-discover along with them. My colleague Alex’s daughter came home from a field trip with her kindergarten class at Peninsula very excited. When Alex asked her: “So, what did they teach you on the field trip?” she looked at him quite bewildered. “Daddy, she said,” they don’t teach us anything, “they help us figure things out.”

There are many places for passion at Peninsula. Weaving room where Barbie presides over a collection of old-fashioned looms; library where Misha every year teaches a “choice” on tea, elaborately weaving history and geography into tea tasting ceremonies; auditorium where kids stage plays or perform in the annual rock concert (everyone who wants to plays); woodshop where kids make everything from houses to benches for the school; math room with Liz where you play games without knowing that you are also honing your math skills, and many others.

Every teacher at Peninsula has a passion for something and is allowed to teach to that passion without being told by the district or some bureaucrat who doesn’t know anything about a particular child telling him/her what to teach; every teacher is a colorful memorable personality with whom you have a special relationship and who you will probably never forget.

Kids learn most if they are allowed to learn on their own terms. You know how when your kid is truly interested in something, she can spend hours doing it? This in creativity literature is called the “flow state. ” Mihaly Csikszenthimalyi, a psychologist and expert on creativity defines flow state as the “feeling of complete and energized focus on activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.” If the kid is truly interested in dinosaurs, she can in no time memorize all the dinosaur types and learn fine distinctions between them. The same activity may be impossibly difficult to do if it is “assigned” and happens at the time when the child is really into music. So you can spend hours forcing the kid to memorize the names or she can do it on her own in a few minutes if she is interested. Unfortunately, most schools force kids to learn according to structures and times set by bureaucratic imperatives rather than kids’ own timing and inner interests. In fact, most schools with their highly structured lesson times and sequences go against the whole concept of “going with the flow”— kids who are interested in something are rarely allowed to spend as much time on the activity as they need and at the same time are forced to sit in activities they are not interested in at all. This is another reason why so much time is spent on discipline–discipline issues are often a direct result of boredom—when kids are truly engaged in something, they don’t have time to be disruptive.

The less free time kids have, the more their days in school and after school are structured, the less time we allow for kids to achieve these “flow” states and to learn at their own pace. Instead of making learning easy for them, allowing them to pick up what they are passionate about at a particular time with ease, we cram what we think is appropriate on our, not their, time schedule.

Peninsula gifts kids their time—time to explore, be bored, or pursue their passions in their way and on their schedule. This is achieved through giving kids a lot of free time and a lot of activity choices during the day. Half of the day is spent in classroom activities (although these do not look at all like regular classrooms but more clusters of kids doing things together in highly hands on manner). What do kids do in their free time? Whatever they are interested in at a particular time. Some may play poker; others may play chess, someone might be reading, another digging in the sand, or drawing in the art room, or making a scarf in the weaving room, or just having conversations. Our neighbor Matt spent most of his free time in the science room with Linda, the science teacher, because he was really into science. He went on to study at Cornell and is how getting his PhD in engineering at Stanford while working at NASA. Whenever he is back home, his first stop is in the science room with Linda. He considers Linda the best science teacher he’s ever had and to him nothing compares to “doing science” at Peninsula.

Greg spent all his free time in the music room. John Fuller, Peninsula’s music teacher, encourages kids starting in 4th grade to create bands (mostly rock bands because that’s what most of the kids at that age are interested in). He doesn’t form bands, doesn’t pick kids for different bands, there are no signups or shuffling of who should be where or play what—all of this kids do on their own without any adult interference, and it is an elaborate social dance—music, after all, is a social activity. John helps kids figure out enough easy tunes (he doesn’t teach them to read music) so that they can make music together and “get hooked.” The rest is up to the kids. They can drop out at any time, continue playing easy pieces, or build on what John has given them and take it as far as they want. Music has become the focus of Greg’s life and his musical tastes are quite wide—he has studied with several accomplished musicians from whom he learned a lot but no one could’ve accomplished what John Fuller has with simple notes, a lot of time and heart, genuine passion and friendship with the kids. What Linda is for Matt, John has become for Greg. The place Greg goes back to at Peninsula is the music room.

Learning is not something that just happens in the classroom. So how does it happen that kids who spend seemingly less time in structured instruction and have a lot of free time to explore come away well prepared academically and enthusiastic about learning? The best way to explain it is that at Peninsula learning happens not just in the classroom for 45 minutes but everywhere and any time—during free time, in activities, after school when kids are hanging out together. At a recent graduates forum, where alums are asked to relate their experiences of transitioning into “regular” high schools, a sophomore from an exclusive private school on the Peninsula related how surprised she was to find out that at her new school “learning was something you did in the classroom”—kids didn’t continue conversations started in the classroom outside. Such separations are non-existent at Peninsula. Barbie, weaving teacher, told me about a child asking her while weaving “What is DNA?” Barbie’s answer was “Do you want a 10 minute answer or a deeper one?” which led to an impromptu discussion of the structure of DNA among about 10 kids ranging in age from 10 to 14. Same happens in woodshop where, unbeknownst to them, kids are introduced to basics of geometry while doing cool building projects. While on the surface it appears that kids are spending less time on academic subjects, in reality their days are filled with learning, learning that is meaningful to them and occurs on their terms. Conversations about civil war started in the classroom continue in the gazebo at lunch or in activities, they are also brought into homes because kids are not so exhausted from school that the last thing they want to talk about at home is “school.”

Another reason Peninsula kids do well is that although they may not cover the breath of subjects, what they do cover, they cover in depth and in a way that is hard to forget. How can one not remember the Spanish Armada if part of your study involves building paper warships and merchant boats and sailing them through a large puddle in the middle of the school serving as the English channel?

I know, it is hard for every school re-create the learning environment of Peninsula but I do think there are lessons from progressive education, of which Peninsula is just one example, that we are ignoring today. In our rush to compete with China and India, to get “measurable results,” to get our kids into “good” colleges, we are creating a paradox—kids turned off from learning, kids who, according to Denise Pope, a professor of education at Stanford, are “doing school” rather than learning.

At the end of his high school career Greg talked openly about hating school and never wanting to “do academics again.” How different this was from what he said at his graduation from Peninsula, “There wasn’t a day I did not look forward to going to school. I loved every day I spent here.” This says it all.

Why Do These Kids Love School
Peninsula School website
Denise Clark Pope, Doing School

It’s a Material World?

Marina-Gorbis — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:51:11 +0000

I just went through a ritual of helping my kid move into a college dorm. The college he is entering has pretty much mastered what could otherwise be a chaotic and messy process. We had exact directions for where to go, where to drop stuff off, and there were plenty of helpers and carts on site. While watching my son’s belongings as he was lugging stuff upstairs, I had the occasion to review everyone else’s pile of stuff, one of which included a giant flat screen TV (several kids hoped to get the owner as a roommate). The amount of stuff was impressive, with even more modest piles probably having enough to furnish a house in a “less developed” country. It got me thinking about Peter Menzel’s book “Material World” published in the early 90’s and showing pictures of families with all their belongings in front of their houses. In fact, when I got home I found an old NOVA PBS documentary based on the book and called “World in the Balance.” I just wanted to see how a single American teenager compares in terms of material possessions (physical only and probably partially so as, I am sure, most kids left lots of stuff at home) to families around the world. In my inexpert judgment they have way more than the Wu family in China had in the early 90’s, about a third of what a three person family in Japan had, way more than a family in Mali (albeit no pots and pans), and about a quarter of what the American family of four had at the time. And this is just what they are starting life with.

Any wonder I was humming “I’m a Material Girl” all the way home?

Searching For Grisha Perelman

Marina-Gorbis — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:53:39 +0000

Remember Grisha Perelman, Russian mathematician who declined the Fields medal in mathematics? At first I thought he was a nut—a familiar caricature of a quirky mathematics professor, riven by social anxiety, unable to hold a conversation, or tie his shoelaces. A Russian version of Bobby Fisher or John Nash, maybe even Ted Kozinski, who will eventually drop off the face of the earth only to be found years later and hauled away in handcuffs as he mumbled incoherently. After all, who in his right mind would not jump on the opportunity of fame and riches (and in Russia, $500,000 is definitely riches) that go along with winning the Fields prize in mathematics? Only someone mentally unstable.

For all I know, Grisha Perelman may have been all that—a nutty Russian eccentric. But as I read more about him, he seemed more and more familiar. Actually, the more I read, the more I found myself feeling nostalgic for people like him, people I used to know in Russia in the 70’s—writers, poets, artists, musicians, physicists. They lived in the rarefied world of ideas, completely removed from cares for success defined by money and fame. They gathered in tiny kitchens around cramped tables to drink tea, smoke cigarettes, argue, recite poetry, sing underground songs, exchange latest news of travails with the Soviet bureaucracy, and talk about big ideas. Troubles with the bureaucracy, being denied publication, or having a movie premiere canceled by the censors was their badge of honor, their status symbol. They lived in the forgotten world of pure intellectual and spiritual freedom that seems only possible in a totalitarian state where ideas is the only escape and only reward. This is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn talked about when he said that the freest he ever felt was in the Gulag. I guess the only regime more repressive, and at the same time more free than the Soviet regime, was the Soviet prison regime. In the Gulag there is nothing more one can lose, nothing much to aspire to. One can experience the kind of spiritual, almost ascetic freedom that is hard to imagine in a society in which there is so much to lose—good jobs, money, possessions, celebrity status.

The best and the brightest could not possibly succeed in the Soviet Union unless they did such unsavory things as joined the Communist Party, bribed or betrayed someone along the way. And of course, they couldn’t be Jewish, that a priori denied one entry into the official Soviet elite. And what did success mean anyway? A few more rubles? Opportunity to spend vacations at a special resort for Party members? Ensuring your child’s entry into a university? Ability to travel abroad on measly Soviet allowance? Horizons for success were limited and hardly worth the effort. Nothing compared to the Fields prize.

Instead, the people like Perelman built their own worlds. They created, invented, wrote for the pure pleasure of it. What did that gain them? Besides the pleasure of creation, ability to be a part of a circle of the best of the Russian intelligentsia. Succeeding in any traditional sense—being published, getting high level jobs, being rewarded with trips overseas meant selling out. Often it led to exclusion from the circle. Despite their lack of recognition and often persecution by the state, intellectuals like Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sakharov served as a beacon for the rest of the progressive Russian society. They set the moral tone and gave a model for the rest to aspire to. They were heroes of my youth. My high school circle of friends fashioned ourselves after them—we were intellectuals, reading, debating, and in many cases, imitating their lives. They, rather than Bill Gates or Paris Hilton, were our paragons of success.

I find myself looking for people like them when I go back to the new Russia. But they are a dying breed, harder and harder to find in the new country filled with opportunity, possibilities of unheard of riches, and new success stories. My artist friend in Moscow whose tiny apartment was filled with exquisite avant garde paintings he could not get government permission to exhibit? He is making money doing portraits of the “new Russians”, the latter a much more extravagant version of the Soviet Communist Party elite. My friend who played violin in the symphony? She is busy playing the restaurant scene in the evenings. My poet friend? He is doing accounts payable for health companies in New York.

I don’t blame them, at least no more than I blame myself for living in California in a nice house and not in a run-down communal apartment in Russia. I just miss these people, that world, those ideas, and the kind of freedom that emerged in the most unlikely of places, a totalitarian state. And Grisha Perelman? He may yet turn out to be another Bobby Fisher. I am hoping, however, that he is just an anachronism of the old world who managed to wash up on the shores of the new Russia.

New Esperanto, Please?!

Marina-Gorbis — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:20:56 +0000

Esperanto was to become a universal language that would bring together enemies and friends in harmony across linguistic boundaries. This is how Ludwik Zamenhof, its inventor, a Jewish doctor in the Tsarist Russia of the 1800’s described his hopes for this language of peace:

“In Bialystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies…This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an ‘anguish for the world’ in a child. Since at that time I thought that ‘grown-ups’ were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil.”

http://www.u-matthias.de/latino/latin_en.htm#3

I think of Dr. Zamenhof wistfully as I engage in wars of understanding with myriads voice-activated devices and customer service lines. I seem to be at war with each of them, and they are definitely at war with each other. My car navigation wants me to distinctly enunciate SAN FRANCISCO as two separate words, while my AT&T directory doesn’t recognize the word no matter what I do; United customer service wants me to speak in a natural tone while my medical clinic expects me to sound like a robot; the satellite TV service likes high voices while the teleconference service I use is distinctly biased against women. When asked how many languages I speak, I can proudly say Russian, English, Ukrainian, bits of German and French, in addition to Sears toaster, car GPS, Aetna help line, and many others. I used to speak WildfFre (telephone based voice recognition agent) but I am a bit rusty now so don’t try to speak WildFire with me.

Esperanto in its own language means “one who hopes.” I hope that in the very near future there will emerge an Esperanto for appliances and customer services. I want harmony and peace to reign in my car, in my home, and anywhere and everywhere I go. Please?!!!